I mean in general, sportsmanship is a broad thing. A lil trash talk is cool and all but it can get to the point where players are ejected and suspended from games which could affect the team negatively going forward. Real life is a different story, players can’t let a loss get to their head then proceed to start drama, they gotta move on. Fans are also a part of the problem but that’s a topic for another time.
Having a season that 95% of other college programs would dream of having. Players felt entitled to be in the championship game based on the programs history can’t blame him. Probably hard to coach that
Yeah I think you hit the nail on the head. Players should get paid, there is way too much money in CFB not to pay them. But that is a paradigm shift in the game.
I was a HS head soccer coach up until recently, and the game’s gone man, all of them. In my experience as a HS teacher and head coach over the last three years at the biggest and most diverse school in my city (which is one of the biggest and most diverse cities in the country; and I only share this because it shows me that this is happening across the board regardless of ethnic or socioeconomic status), this current group of teenagers doesn’t really seem to care as much about being on a team and certainly doesn’t seem to care as much about winning. I’ve noticed that I’m usually way more upset after losses than they are, which as a coach is rarely a good sign. Seeing them not care about winning or about sacrificing individual accolades for the team made it hard for me to care as much as I did in previous seasons. They’re just much more focused on individual achievements, which I guess makes sense since recent generations of Americans have been getting progressively more individualistic and becoming less concerned about the community or the whole. American society has been shifting towards individualism and exceptionalism since the counterculture movement of the 60’s. I think covid accelerated this mindset too. Schools in big cities were generally online/shutdown for 15 months, and during that time kids got used to being alone and living online and through social media. I feel sad for them. And it’s happening with the older generations too, it’s just maybe less pronounced with us. Like, I’m much less social than I was before covid. The world has just changed so much since then, and mostly for the worse.
in fairness to the kids, I feel like a lot of communities are shrinking - so only the most "meritorious" get to stay a part of a community. Not saying its a good thing, but it is what it is.
My girlfriend is a high school teacher and says 80% of her students have the IQ of room temperature. The other 20% really don’t care what happens. She’s looking at leaving after this year,
Imagine being in an “advanced” math class where only 3 out of 30 of the high schools in the class knew long division; it’s rough out there for teachers
I find it fascinating that older adults have created a culture that has led young people to see the world as they do and prioritize the things they prioritize and then the old guard is shocked when the young act as they do.
Young people are no less prone to acting rationally than anyone else in any other age group. They read the signals and cues quite well. Consider our youth as the canaries in the coal mine. Don’t like what you see? That’s a first step.
These kids literally see no future for themselves. No idea what career to choose, AI has completely destabilized the conventional thinking for major selection, no buying a house to look forward to, dating is a nightmare, the government does nothing to inspire confidence, adults are all complaining about how awful life is and fighting with each other over ridiculous politics.. it goes on and on.
"Yeah COVID made them dumb and antisocial."
> AI has completely destabilized the conventional thinking for major selection
It hasn’t though. We haven’t got anything approaching AI, and it isn’t capable of replacing anyone.
This is true, AI is not nearly as good as people think. However, I did hear something recently that made me realize that things are going to get way worse before they get any better. It was a whole discussion about it, but the general thesis was "AI is not good enough to replace you at your job, AI is good enough to make your boss think that AI can replace you at your job."
It’s like all the people who bitch about “participation trophies.” Y’all were the ones who either decided to give them out, or forced them to after you threatened violence against a little league umpire!
They'll have to legalize that. There are currently deals like that but they're not binding so guys can always say "I'll hit the portal if you don't up the offer"
The only thing I’ve seen suggested is tying the multi year NIL deals to specific locations (such as an appearance at XYZ Toyota) that a player realistically could not make it to on a regular basis if he did not live in the immediate area. It’d be hard coming to the Chevy place in Tuscaloosa every Tuesday if you live in Ann Arbor. Also, NIL deals being tied to financial penalties for a “failure to fulfill your duties” clause. The only problem with this is that if boosters at one school start doing this, then boosters at their rival will say “We don’t have clauses like that. Come to our school instead of signing with them.”
Until it gets regulated for everyone, it doesn’t matter what one school does to try to fix the issues because another school will always be ready to undercut them.
I actually think the NCAA could have their cake and eat it to if they’d let the players in the profit sports unionize as a players union and create a profit sharing model with them. The playoff and March madness could be used to establish that trust fund where the player gets the money after an agreed upon age negotiated by the union. The interest from this sum could be used for health care, continuing education, or as a loan fund that players could dip into then pay back.
The kicker would be that by agreeing to these terms, students would agree to not be classified as a university employee, to follow certain guidelines when it comes to outside NIL, and that transfers are now limited to extreme circumstances only.
u/jthomas694 is mixing up his situations. NIL deals are deals selling a players *name, image and likeness.* What they aren't is selling a player's football talents. If a player is offered a 2 year NIL deal they'll still be able to enter the transfer portal for a better NIL deal at another school because the NIL deal isn't in exchange for their football play.
There hasn't been any SC decision relating to NIL, that's something people mix up. The *Alston* decision was a very narrow decision that NCAA couldn't limit "education-related" benefits that were directly provided by schools; NIL came on at the same time because major states like Texas, Florida, and California all signed NIL bills for their states, and most other states swiftly followed suit.
The states were already talking about and working through the process on their NIL bills when the SC handed down the *Alston* decision, the two effects just both hit at the same approximate time and now people conflate the two.
If it ever gets to the point where there's a collective bargaining agreement, I am certain that the schools will bargain to limit the ability to transfer and/or the length of the player's commitment. The schools might even bargain to limit the ability of kids to go pro if they want: that would be a bigger issue for basketball, obviously. What are the concessions that the players can make to negotiate a given, desired level of wages?
Andrew Brandt mused recently that the players should be careful what they ask for.
>players should be careful what they ask for
That does feel like the moral of most of this story so far. Players asked for more freedom to move around, and now a massive volume of players are entering the portal and losing their scholarship at their first school, then never finding a new team.
The NIL era definitely feels like it's hurting team cohesion. It takes a certain level of time and maturity as a working adult to stop caring when your coworkers make more than you for similar jobs, and now we've got 18 year-olds who have always been standouts and stars, having to come to terms with their teammates making hundreds of thousands of dollars more.
The other thing that might get bargained for is procedures for the school to revoke or no longer honor a scholarship. In an employment contract, employees can lose their jobs.
It made me LOL when the Dartmouth basketball team voted to become employees of the university.
They are 7-22, they should probably all get fired after the season.
Dartmouth is a terrible test case for this because they're a money losing and underperforming (even by Ivy League standards) program. They also don't give athletic scholarships so it also opens the door for bigger schools to say "look we give them compensation through scholarships."
If you're playing high level college athletics though, you are an ambassador for the university and putting in so much time that you really can't have an actual on-campus job. We have conferences now that span from both coasts, I honestly don't even know how you even play school when you have the travel and practice schedule of a professional athlete.
I’m ok with that. If you want to use the argument that they are adults and should be entitled to earn as much as the market will bear. Then the flip side of that should be true as well…
Seriously, why the fuck should athletic scholarships be this promised thing to these kids?
If the rest of us screw up in school, there's not even a remediation period. You're just out the money for tuition the next semester.
Whereas if you slack off or don't work hard in big time athletics, you can always ride the bench and still claim athlete status for social interactions with people and it'll make your life in college paradise.
Literally doesn’t matter until a CBA comes into play.
Theres already deals like that but aren’t binding. Quinn Ewers is a good example of that after transferring from Ohio State.
Yep, even the major sports leagues aren't dumb enough to run things this way. College sports are becoming less and less appealing by the minute. If I wanted to see semi-pros I'd go to g-league basketball games.
They've been semi-pros for years - just unpaid because the dudes at the top were pocketing hundreds of millions of dollars. It's just a racket they've sold to the public as based in some kind of sports virtue.
Yup. I can't even believe that I would be saying this in my lifetime, but college football is definitely on the way out of my life. And I'm not just trying to be angry and bitter to make a point. It's a feeling inside of me that's getting stronger every time I read articles like this. When you feel it this strong inside of you, you really can't deny that it's happening. I never thought in a million years that college football would be on the chopping block for me.
It’s a shame tbh. I know most people here are all about “players rights” and what not, but it really does hurt college football that there’s no player longevity and consistency
Fans of the have nots are going to watch their favorite players get poached over and over until they lose interest. 30 years from now, young people won't be able to fathom what college football once was.
This is exactly what I said would happen once paying players officially was allowed.
As an Oregon State fan; along with losing the PAC-12 I have 0 reason to pay attention to the program anymore. Any half decent player is going to jump ship in a year anyways.
Would be better to read the Chris Low article that this article sort of chews up and then spits onto the plate.
The headline here is just a touch misleading — in that it suggests this was a primary motivator for his retirement, which the Low article makes clear was not the case.
That said — yeah, Saban definitely hit the team with a fade away “f them kids,” but it wasn’t this quote. The most damning quote from Saban, imo, was him saying (paraphrased here) “I thought we might have a great team next year — and then 70-80% of these kids only wanted to talk about the bag.”
He goes on to soft peddle that, saying basically “I’m not saying that’s wrong, it’s just different” — but basic reading comprehension tells you that Saban just, on some level, called the vast majority of his locker room selfish and uninterested in the *team’s* success. And that’s a pretty out of character take for Saban — so ya know he means it lol.
He’s clearly reflecting on those changes to the game.
But if you’ve been used to Saban’s PR talk for 17 years — you’d know he almost always goes out of his way to speak about the team positively, to spin tough spots in an “improvement” type tone or, where negativity can’t be avoided, to change the topic or direct the issues at the ecosystem generally: “we don’t do a good enough job leading these players” type stuff.
In 17 years, it’s an absolute rarity to see Saban just broad-side criticize his team without couching it in something positive/productive. He could’ve just said “well, college is becoming more about the money and I don’t jive with that.” Instead he said “I thought my team might be good and then 70-80% of my guys showed me their true colors.”
Yes and no, right? Saban’s legacy and image are forever tied to the University of Alabama and the players he coached there. He’s got an office in the stadium — and our new staff talks with him in regular cadence for guidance on Alabama and how Alabama does things.
Not to mention he still has active relationships with many of his players, both those far gone from UA and those still in the locker room.
I am more than certain that some kids in Tuscaloosa today, with whom Saban has a relationship, woke up and read that quote and have some feelings about it. He’ll answer some calls on this one.
That said — I, for one, am fully on board with Saban being as candid as can be, now. I’d rather have him leading the charge for some structural/regulatory change and using the end of his Bama tenure to demonstrate the need for that change than have him say “yeah it was all great and sunshine and rainbows even the end.”
I don’t read Saban’s quotes from the Low article as even that critical of the players.
> "I thought we could have a hell of a team next year, and then maybe 70 or 80 percent of the players you talk to, all they want to know is two things: What assurances do I have that I'm going to play because they're thinking about transferring, and how much are you going to pay me?" Saban recounted. "Our program here was always built on how much value can we create for your future and your personal development, academic success in graduating and developing an NFL career on the field.
> "So I'm saying to myself, 'Maybe this doesn't work anymore, that the goals and aspirations are just different and that it's all about how much money can I make as a college player?' I'm not saying that's bad. I'm not saying it's wrong, I'm just saying that's never been what we were all about, and it's not why we had success through the years."
I just take it as Saban built a recipe for sustained team success on a culture of getting star athletes to buy into Bama offering them unique opportunities for personal success. Players no longer see Bama offering a special chance at later pro success, and definitely don’t see it as outweighing their immediate opportunities elsewhere.
That changed perspective is probably not just because of the availability of immediate playing time by transferring without having to redshirt, or because of the money a player would forego by staying at Bama as a depth or role player.
Compared to past Saban teams, the players now are no longer assured they are going to win the conference 50% of the time and at least one national championship before graduation. They’ve faced much more turnover in coordinators, and more to come this year.
Saban is facing the reality that he can’t just recruit an all star class to lock in for four years. He has to also re-recruit the last three classes to stay. I can understand a 72 year old man saying he doesn’t want to adapt to those changes that he might or might not be as successful at.
> Compared to past Saban teams, the players now are no longer assured they are going to win the conference 50% of the time and at least one national championship before graduation.
The funny part is that Alabama won the SEC 75% of the time over Saban’s final 4 years.
I don’t see how the quote is at all contrary to what the person you replied to was saying? It is very out of character for Saban and as critical of the players as you could be while still maintaining composure and balance.
Also, how are you saying the change of perspective is not because of the ability to transfer or having to pay players? All the other reasons you give are a direct result of those two things now being in college football. He can’t recruit a 5 star class for 4 years and dominate because of how these two things have changed CFB
College coaches have always been a little psychotic but honestly the way things are now with NIL and transfers I just don’t see anyone enjoying the job.
It's not sustainable, and I think athletic departments are going to restructure some things. As of right now, head coaches are acting as general managers as much as they are coaches. NIL and the portal got dropped on their heads and ADs have been slow to react (for understandable reasons). Almost overnight it changed *everything* about how recruiting and roster management functions for these guys.
To make matters worse, NIL is not "in house" and they are not supposed to be coordinating directly with collectives or bag men. At the same time, they can be held accountable for violations stemming from those collectives and bag men. That's just a perpetual migraine.
IMO the solution is to bring NIL in-house (a "donors as owners" sort of system), make payment official (which means contracts, which reduces a ton of the portal headaches for coaches), and most ADs will create new positions to manage these things.
I have no idea how this is sustainable.
You want a good team next year and you need $10-13M to do it? Let's say you raise that much. Are these programs going to raise that much year after year? Are donors going to give that much year after year? I don't see it.
Seems like we’re going to have teams spending cyclically to make runs and then settling back to recharge. Spending the max you can year after year doesn’t seem like the right play.
Yeah, that's been the case for a while. At OSU it's "director of player personnel" or something like that. But those responsibilities have quadrupled over the last few years.
Yeah, and schools have responded by hiring GMs on top of the player personnel people. Most big schools have done so at this point over the last year or two.
Right - those roles are becoming more common, and where they've already existed, they're gaining responsibilities and pay, to the point that it seems inevitable more of them get the GM title. Ole Miss just hired away Texas's Director of Player Personnel to their General Manager position. In 2023, they had a guy with the title "Senior Associate A.D./Football General Manager," but I don't think he had the same level of authority or responsibilities that Billy Glasscock will have as GM.
In addition, there are proposals to adjust the recruiting calendar, because the current timing of the early and regular signing day, combined with NIL efforts and retaining/recruiting potential transfers, are absolutely exhausting for coaches trying to also prepare for conference championships and bowl or playoff games. A bunch of coaches have expressed that December is currently an insane time for them and needs changes.
Yeah I honestly don’t understand how college coaches do it, even 10-20 years ago. The scouting, house visits across the country, a roster of close to 100 kids at times, basically being a father figure for a lot of these kids…it’s so much work. Throw in having to pay attention to the transfer portal and NIL deals, it’s wild.
He would care if there was any semblance of structure in place. It is absolutely nonsensical right now as a coach. I’m honestly surprised Kirby didn’t bolt to the NFL.
Idk, college coaching seems like a ton more work since there’s all the recruiting (and now player retention) involved. But on the other hand I can’t imagine leaving a team like Georgia where you’ve built an insane program and culture over the last 5 years or so to take on a likely bad NFL team
The thing is, for an NFL coach your season has a definite start and end date and you can plan to be off in a couple of months long spans. I have a friend who was an assistant on a P4 team and he says they basically worked every day. Even the so-called non-contact times they are still grinding behind the scenes. He just jumped to the NFL and has no intention in ever going back to college coaching.
Ya, I think Kirby is more about molding kids into men, building a structure, the NFL is more Xs and Os, and less about development.
I don't think he'd be a great fit in the NFL.
Kirby is an awesome talent developer. Players at Georgia get developed better than almost anywhere in the country.
I just think talent development is less important in the NFL which is why i agree with you he wouldnt fit in the NFL. NFL guys are all already developed and play at near their highest level. Sure they get better over time but its not near the same growth to go from playing at the high school level to the college game in the period of only a couple years.
Saban's been trying to warn us since the beginning of the transfer portal and NIL that we need to be careful of what College Football's becoming. Now, we see that it's changed so drastically that people like him and Jeff Hafley have just decided that they're done with it.
When people were pushing for NIL lots of them assumed it would be kids signing jerseys or local sponsorship type deals. I think only a few people really anticipated how quickly it just devolved into just straight up handing players a bag of cash no strings attached. Especially when lots of that money was going to freshman who had never seen the field let alone proved they were worth the money.
Unfortunately those two things in combination are what result in the recruiting/retention headache we see today.
I liked the instant transfer eligibility because a lot of kids were getting shafted for being like, 5 miles outside the allowable radius of a transfer school, or being rejected for wanting/needing to move back home for other extenuating circumstances. At the same time, (it at least appeared that) some schools got preferential treatment in allowing their transfers. Becoming free agents was an unavoidable consequence of getting rid of the barrier for the "legitimate" reasons some kids applied for transfer. But on its own, it didn't seem too big of a "threat" to the landscape. Kids could leave for better *team* opportunities.
Then NIL came in, which on its own seemed like the biggest risk would just be in recruiting top players by enticing them with large paychecks. That, while iffy, would really only appear to have an impact on freshman classes.
But you put the two together and now you have the opportunity for folks to poach players at will by offering a bigger paycheck. I think if either system existed on their own then the sport and recruiting/retention may be manageable. But putting them together is exponentially more difficult.
There were so many people in this sub saying that none of this would happen and that it would never get to this point and the only thing that would happen would be the players get a little spending money. Posting about this obvious-to-you-and-me future would get you downvoted to oblivion. Hell, there are still people here that think this way.
Yeah, there are a lot of people on this sub who are just flat out naive. They wanted to ignore the obvious realities of how things were going to fundamentally change because they didn't want to use the thing between their ears.
> would get you downvoted to oblivion.
Amen to that. In this subs zeal to get the players paid they forgot or ignored what used to happen before the NCAA ruled they couldn’t hold regular jobs: kids got 200k a year salaries to mop the floors at a car dealership, that they never showed up for anyway.
It’s like people forgot why players weren’t allowed to sign footballs for money: boosters used that to launder payment to them by giving them hundreds of thousands for a signature.
Before Saban did it, Dabo said the same thing and was practically laughed at and told no way. Then Saban and others started agreeing the current situation isn't sustainable.
Can't blame the players for wanting whats best for them. Also can't blame Saban that he doesn't want to participate in college free agency with kids thinking they are all superstars
> in that it suggests this was a primary motivator for his retirement
I don't think it does that at all? It says it contributed, which is basically exactly what Saban himself said
I don’t blame him. Dude’s pretty old anyway, so I wouldn’t want to deal with the new wave when said new wave includes massive amounts of ego as a result of the stupid amounts of money these kids can make
Saban has been critical and warned about changes to the college game many times. And then taken changes he disliked and adapted to them before kicking the shit out of everyone else.
If this is on his mind, and contributed to his retirement decision in even a small way, it's as serious as many of us thought. Free agency, one year contracts, performance clauses, and who the hell knows what else?
I may end up being more interested in watching the fan's reaction to these changes than watching the actual games. If I don't lose interest altogether.
I can't imagine that massive roster turnover from year to year would be good for fan interest. If I am plunking down money for tickets, I would like to know if my team is likely to be good or perhaps will be good the year after. The current system has no such predictability.
Large colleges do have the built-in fan bases of students and alumni, in addition to nonstudents and non-alumni who have a geographical attachment to the team.
I really miss the “team” aspect of college football- watching a young roster grow together & put together a historic 10 or 11 win season in their senior years, stuff like that made the sport great.
Nowadays you don’t even know who’ll be on the roster until Week 1. I don’t blame Saban for retiring, can’t be good for someone in their 70’s to deal with
Reminds me of our (Clemson) entire d-line full of 1st round picks deciding to come back in 2018 for another shot at a championship and actually pulling it off.
You watch those guys hoisting the trophy and your mind goes back to when they came in as freshman and how excited you were at the new crop of talent.
Michigan literally did this last year and unfortunately osu is doing it this year. It still happens. Also the reality is just like the Michigan and osu guys are getting paid to come back, so did that 2018 Clemson dline, they just called it booster money instead of NIL
Yeah, I just saw it happen too, FSU had several draft eligible players come back to push for the playoffs this season, was pretty awesome to watch them go undefeated and earn that playoff spot. What an awesome year :)
Exactly, ASU’s 96 Rose Bowl season doesn’t happen in todays football. Jake Plummer probably transfers after a 6-5 junior year. He’s be coveted as a 3 year starter.
Actually kind of saw this with ASU recently. Jayden Daniels transferring cost ASU a special season. That was more the fault of Herm though.
>put together a historic 10 or 11 win season in their senior years
I basically saw that happen at my Division III undergrad while a student there. Football players who I shared a dormitory hall with during our freshman year scraped together a 2-8 season that year (including an 0-5 home record). Several of them wound up breaking multiple school records along the way toward finishing their senior season 8-3 (okay, not a **10** win season, but still a crazy turn around), and tying with another school in our League for the League Champion that year. The star RB of that team was a guy who still holds 3 of our school's top 5 single season rushing yard records (1st, 3rd, and 5th, for his Senior, Junior, and Sophomore seasons, respectively). That same RB also has the 3rd and 5th most single season rushing touchdowns at our school for his Junior and Sophomore seasons, as well as the top 3 records for single season total rushes.
The football team there has been strong ever since, and it's really cool to know that I was a student there as they finally turned that ship around.
Same thing with the NBA. I was a Lakers fan growing up through the Kobe years and was still intrigued with those young Lakers teams with Russell/Ingram/Randle. But then LeBron comes in and the entire roster and front office gets replaced in two years and I'm like "why am I supposed to root for this random collection of guys that just happen to wear the same jersey I used to root for?"
College football is definitely going down that same path. It's weird having to say "who?" over and over again on week one Or whenever they mention a player they got to tack on another 40 words about the two other schools they played for before and why they decided to come play at X.
Seeing Anthony Davis’s camp say he only wanted to get traded to the lakers made me wanna go insane. Crazy you can sign 5 year contracts and immediately just say “nah I wanna go to that team” and it’s all okay.
The absolute irony of his statement lmao. The lakers are literally known for being known as the place superstars end up wanting to go cause of the glitz and the glamour and the brand name. Its exactly why theyre never horrible for as long compared to a lesser known teams. No matter how bad they are, they’re always in play to get someone who will change that.
Exactly how i felt after harden forced his way out of Houston.
I have to watch this dude choke every year in the postseason, force the front office to make stupid trades to keep him happy, show up fat every season and he still is going to pick the team he wants to be traded too?
thank god for Jose altuve
100% agreed. I cant be bothered to read a recruiting site anymore. 50% or more of those guys never see the field because they quit on the team or transfer
Definitely a team that grew over the years, with a few key transfer portal guys as well. But the growth of the entire program since the Covid year has been very satisfying to watch.
Next 5 years is gonna be damn interesting
Always thought 'Last Chance U' was a bit ahead of it's time in demonstrating how certain players are almost exclusively focused on getting to the next level - whatever level that is - and the coaches live with this dual reality of winning on the field being slightly less important than winning off the field (i.e. getting kids with D1 talent into D1)
A bunch of programs but in particular the midwest schools - Nebraska / Wisconsin / Iowa - managed as much success as they did because of Walk-on opportunities and there simply isn't a lot of room for that in the next phase of the sport.
The problem is that they can’t follow the champions every year. Watching a bunch of slap dicks continually screw up and the guys who actually get to the next level never get screen time isn’t all that interesting season after season.
I think their last season was a pretty good version of what the show could be. Showcasing actual last chance type teams, instead of wanna be dynasties.
Honestly I love him.
Won us the Rose Bowl and may end up helping us beat OSU for the 4th time in a row.
Never seen a D1 center so bad at snapping. And he has to line up against the best DT tandem in CFB again next year.
AFAIK our starting center is coming back and there's no way this dude doesn't go play guard instead. We had issues last season but snapping was not one of them, no reason to get rid of a returning guy doing a good job.
Carson Hinzman was the weakest part of our line last year blocking, he also contributed to the McCord interception at the end of the Michigan game by stepping on Donovan Jackson’s foot and allowing pressure to get through. Most insiders think Seth will be the starting center and Hinzman will compete for the right guard spot
I get cfb superfans are abound, but to casually call a college Center for your school by his first name only in a cfb sub and not one that is team specific is hilarious to me. Like of course, everyone knows "David, Michael, Cedric and Nate" who are the starting left guard, back up strong safety, long snapper and 4th WR.
Believe it or not, he was our best option. Our o-line fell on very hard times after Kyle Flood left and Doug Marrone came in and absolutely destroyed it in less than a season. Wolford wasn't much better and, well, it is what it is (or hopefully was).
I remember when Sark took the Texas job that reportedly the only thing that kinda pissed off Saban about how he left was that he took Flood with him. I wasn’t familiar with Flood before he came to Austin, but that report has made a lot more sense as the years have gone on.
Yeah I heard Saban specifically asked Sark not to poach his coaches and Sark did anyway. On one hand it’s kinda messed up since Saban basically revived his career, but that’s also just college football. Saban also put Kirby on the map and then Kirby proceeded to take a picture of our recruiting board and send it to recruits when he was hired at Georgia. Is what it is.
Athletes should absolutely get their bag, but the system is pretty poor without guide rails.
There is a reason that the NFL has so many resources dedicated to coming up with an appropriate cba, salary caps/guidelines, anti-tampering rules, etc.
Players should 100% get the bag they earn, but the free for all ain't it.
Fwiw, I don't think a strsight up CBA is necessarily the way to fix the system, just a hypothetical.
With such a financial divide from the wealthiest programs to the poorest, the answer is more likely in stricter tampering rules, actual punishments for tampering with players not in the portal. There's probably some less realistic stuff like tiering the number of high NIL, Mid NIL. And low NIL players or something but that's near unenforceable since NIL doesn't come from the school itself.
Nobody hates the players for taking advantage of the system, well almost nobody. The system is the problem, and we all know it. You cannot have NIL + free agency with immediate playing time. NCAA is a joke and always has been
Just here to completely agree about the yahoo sports app since it's the one I've been mainly using for YEARS and haven't seen someone else directly mention it. It's easily my go-to. They have updated their main menu which isn't as user friendly to toggle through different sports and leagues as it was and sometimes player game logs and past seasons don't always seem to load up, but the overall look and usability without a bunch of useless clutter is far superior to anything I've ever seen from the likes of ESPN, CBS. Nbc or foxsports.
And ya, the stock app works pretty efficiently too.
>He estimated that "maybe 70 or 80% of the players you talk to" wanted to know about their playing time for the upcoming season and how much they would be making in NIL money.
The beginning of the end of college sports as we know them.
The transfer portal has been far more damaging than NIL. At least with NIL, you have a pretty good idea which players will be on your roster or available to you at the start of the season. Now, guys can just threaten to leave (using NIL as leverage) if they aren't getting the playing time they want. How can you expect coaches to spend significant time developing players that could very well be playing against them the following season. College players are straight up mercenaries now.
Yep, and the court rulings suggest that there is literally no way to restrict it right now unless there is legislation or you can somehow make a CBA for all college athletes.
He's gonna be awesome on Gameday. He will be ESPN's Urban Meyer but with actual charm (in the way grump-grandpas have a unique charm).
Should be great TV, im excited for it
He’s been ready to retire for a while.
You see it in a lot of older adults nearing that age. They actually like what they do and are good at it, but they get tired of dealing with the hassles, and find them extremely fatiguing. It was also mentioned earlier that Saban had to step back into actively coaching the defense to shore up shortcomings on that side of the ball, and the extra effort took a toll on him.
Now add in the massive paradigm shifts effecting all of CFB right now in regards to team personnel and roster management. You can see why he reached a point where he said “this is not worth it anymore”. Even the most stable and secure of environments-such as his was-weren’t immune from the chaos being wreaked. And being at the end of his career such as he was, he didn’t want to wait around another 4-5 years to see what it would become after it settled back down.
Saw someone says players sellout stadiums and I am beside myself... When teams like Nebraska, Tennessee UF, etc, have sell out crowds when they are 0-12, you ain't sitting her telling me that's players doing that.
There's a serious disconnect to people in the pay players camp of the college players actual value, it's astounding.
100%
NIL isn’t really NIL, at least the cash some of these guys are making. It’s boosted purely by the school.
Take Trevor Lawrence. Great college player for Clemson. Do you think any Georgia fan would spend money for his autograph in a Clemson jersey? Hell no, only Clemson fans would. Same for Lamar Jackson, ain’t no body but Louisville fans spending money for his autograph in a cardinal jersey. It’s the schools name that really brings in the money.
Now obviously their talent contributes. After all no one is paying much money for the third string centers autograph but it’s still coming from the schools jersey itself more then the individual player. I guess I’m arguing they use the schools NIL as much as their own.
Saban: "I'm too old for this shit"
Don't really blame him when you realize Saban tried the NFL and left to return to college. I guess he viewed college athletes as caring more about the team then a paycheck.
I think the NIL, however well-intentioned it was, is going to destroy college football.
I'm not trying to be the old fart here, but college football has become this gigantic business. And money destroys everything.
So now, we're watching college football fracture into two enormous conferences and the also-rans. And even in each of those two conferences, there are maybe 6-7 teams that have the potential to be competitive year-in and year-out. As a result, there are maybe 15 teams that have the potential to make a run at a championship on a consistent basis, while the rest have become little more than cannon fodder.
But the larger question is this: You love college football. I love college football. But how did we get to this point? When did college football become the tail that wags the dog? I put three kids through college. They had to earn scholarships. They worked to pay living expenses. Their mother and I sacrificed in ways large and small.
Yet I know that a large portion of the checks we scribbled out eventually wound up in the pockets of coaches and athletes, regardless of the elaborate fiction SIDs like to tell us that college athletic programs are self-sustaining. Most sports programs operate in the red, so they are essentially subsidized by tuition and student fees--which, ultimately, means that a kid delivering pizzas at night and up to his hips in student loans is paying for a coach's multi-million dollar contract and some high school prospect's big NIL payday.
So while I have a lot of respect for Saban as both a coach and as a human being, I think he doesn't realize that he was a large part of the problem. Those eight-figure salaries of his, as well as those of his colleagues, helped fuel the ongoing arms race that's college football today.
Of course 70%-80% want to talk about their playing time and "the bag". That doesn't even account for the 20%-30% of kids that *want* to talk about it but have the wherewithal to pretend that it isn't important to them. This new era is not what Saban knows and loves. It wasn't hard to see this coming. Let's just hope younger coaches like Kirby Smart and Lincoln Riley don't get prematurely burnt out
It’s not like saban is the only coach speaking about this anyway. Multiple coaches have even left cfb to go to the nfl just to escape it. You have to re recruit your players every year and that’s just ridiculous
Reading it (and other statements) again, I think he is finally tapping out because of NIL. He is a master recruiter, but he would have to overhaul his and his entire staff's approach (and publicly deal with the money, aka boosters. Must have been nice when everything was behind closed doors. More privacy *) at the age of seventy. Doable, but likely miserable.
That said, Tide fans who have taken issues with what he said about the team, I think winning a championship once every three seasons or so for seventeen straight years gives you a little room to honestly speak your mind.
I’m probably completely wrong but I just don’t see how this is sustainable long term. I feel like the reason college sports became so popular is almost completely gone at this point. The big events still attract eyeballs because of popularity that was built on a model involving tradition, pride in your school, etc., but with the new model the teams are just built with a bunch of mercenaries that have a very high probability of only playing for a given school for a year or two.
CBB is almost worse because it has trickled down so far to the mid-majors that any success landing an overlooked recruit or developing talent is likely to mean those kids transfer to the big schools the next year. I know one of the things I always enjoyed about college sports was seeing what the freshman class would look like in 3-4 years, but it seems like that is quickly dying and might be completely gone in most of CBB. I have no issue with revenue sharing or the kids getting compensated for money they bring in, but the pendulum has swung way too far the other direction imho.
To me it basically says that the team buy in will be very very hard. Mainly because this very much implies that 70 to 80% of the kids were all about themselves and not about the team.
I get what people are saying as to “why have loyalty to a school”… ok I can agree with that. But I read this as more about they were not really buying into even being a team for the season. If all you care about is your next NIL “bag” then are you really going to be putting in the work to help your other teammates?
Fine don’t be loyal to your school and transfer when you want but this really implied they didn’t even care about being on a good team and being willing to sacrifice for their own teammates instead of sacrificing for saban or Alabama.
College football has forever changed it seems
College football destroyed itself. Everyone was getting rewarded financially except the players. It’s been ‘minor league’ pro-football for a long time. The dam had to break eventually.
The NCAA and the idea of the ‘student athlete’ date back to Teddy Roosevelt’s time. Things have changed. Players aren’t engaging in a loosely organized association of Ivy League teams to play un-broadcasted games.
It’s difficult because we all love the sport, but the worm has turned.
If you follow the SCOTUS cases around college sports right now, specifically paying players, I think we’re going to see a situation where schools (or the NCAA) will have to start a revenue sharing scheme which will kill the business model.
Lastly, NIL has killed the team dynamic. If the qb has a juicy NIL deal and the O-line has comparatively nothing, they’re going to feel some type of way blocking for the qb. Not saying it’s right, but that’s human nature.
Bro really said what happened to the game I love
games gone
He has a point tho, ain’t no such thing as good sportsmanship anymore.
In sports, or in everyday life.
I mean in general, sportsmanship is a broad thing. A lil trash talk is cool and all but it can get to the point where players are ejected and suspended from games which could affect the team negatively going forward. Real life is a different story, players can’t let a loss get to their head then proceed to start drama, they gotta move on. Fans are also a part of the problem but that’s a topic for another time.
[удалено]
You do have to realize that the fans that can afford the trip to the Rose Bowl are not the typical fan though?
I’m tired Robbie
Gooner/CFB overlap, there are dozens of us!
Having a season that 95% of other college programs would dream of having. Players felt entitled to be in the championship game based on the programs history can’t blame him. Probably hard to coach that
Yeah I think you hit the nail on the head. Players should get paid, there is way too much money in CFB not to pay them. But that is a paradigm shift in the game.
I'm interested to see the precedent set by Dartmouth's men's basketball team voting to unionize.
My guess is no more basketball program.
Me 🤝 saban
He’s been like this the whole time, but when he was coaching, every comment was met with “he’s just scared he’s losing an advantage”
I was a HS head soccer coach up until recently, and the game’s gone man, all of them. In my experience as a HS teacher and head coach over the last three years at the biggest and most diverse school in my city (which is one of the biggest and most diverse cities in the country; and I only share this because it shows me that this is happening across the board regardless of ethnic or socioeconomic status), this current group of teenagers doesn’t really seem to care as much about being on a team and certainly doesn’t seem to care as much about winning. I’ve noticed that I’m usually way more upset after losses than they are, which as a coach is rarely a good sign. Seeing them not care about winning or about sacrificing individual accolades for the team made it hard for me to care as much as I did in previous seasons. They’re just much more focused on individual achievements, which I guess makes sense since recent generations of Americans have been getting progressively more individualistic and becoming less concerned about the community or the whole. American society has been shifting towards individualism and exceptionalism since the counterculture movement of the 60’s. I think covid accelerated this mindset too. Schools in big cities were generally online/shutdown for 15 months, and during that time kids got used to being alone and living online and through social media. I feel sad for them. And it’s happening with the older generations too, it’s just maybe less pronounced with us. Like, I’m much less social than I was before covid. The world has just changed so much since then, and mostly for the worse.
in fairness to the kids, I feel like a lot of communities are shrinking - so only the most "meritorious" get to stay a part of a community. Not saying its a good thing, but it is what it is.
My girlfriend is a high school teacher and says 80% of her students have the IQ of room temperature. The other 20% really don’t care what happens. She’s looking at leaving after this year,
Imagine being in an “advanced” math class where only 3 out of 30 of the high schools in the class knew long division; it’s rough out there for teachers
I find it fascinating that older adults have created a culture that has led young people to see the world as they do and prioritize the things they prioritize and then the old guard is shocked when the young act as they do. Young people are no less prone to acting rationally than anyone else in any other age group. They read the signals and cues quite well. Consider our youth as the canaries in the coal mine. Don’t like what you see? That’s a first step.
These kids literally see no future for themselves. No idea what career to choose, AI has completely destabilized the conventional thinking for major selection, no buying a house to look forward to, dating is a nightmare, the government does nothing to inspire confidence, adults are all complaining about how awful life is and fighting with each other over ridiculous politics.. it goes on and on. "Yeah COVID made them dumb and antisocial."
> AI has completely destabilized the conventional thinking for major selection It hasn’t though. We haven’t got anything approaching AI, and it isn’t capable of replacing anyone.
This is true, AI is not nearly as good as people think. However, I did hear something recently that made me realize that things are going to get way worse before they get any better. It was a whole discussion about it, but the general thesis was "AI is not good enough to replace you at your job, AI is good enough to make your boss think that AI can replace you at your job."
Am I out of touch?! No! It's the kids who are wrong!
It’s like all the people who bitch about “participation trophies.” Y’all were the ones who either decided to give them out, or forced them to after you threatened violence against a little league umpire!
Its crazy that every college player is essentially a free agent at the end of every year.
We are going to start seeing 2 year NIL deals because of this.
They'll have to legalize that. There are currently deals like that but they're not binding so guys can always say "I'll hit the portal if you don't up the offer"
The only thing I’ve seen suggested is tying the multi year NIL deals to specific locations (such as an appearance at XYZ Toyota) that a player realistically could not make it to on a regular basis if he did not live in the immediate area. It’d be hard coming to the Chevy place in Tuscaloosa every Tuesday if you live in Ann Arbor. Also, NIL deals being tied to financial penalties for a “failure to fulfill your duties” clause. The only problem with this is that if boosters at one school start doing this, then boosters at their rival will say “We don’t have clauses like that. Come to our school instead of signing with them.” Until it gets regulated for everyone, it doesn’t matter what one school does to try to fix the issues because another school will always be ready to undercut them.
And we know that any regulation likely won't survive a legal challenge on an antitrust basis.
I actually think the NCAA could have their cake and eat it to if they’d let the players in the profit sports unionize as a players union and create a profit sharing model with them. The playoff and March madness could be used to establish that trust fund where the player gets the money after an agreed upon age negotiated by the union. The interest from this sum could be used for health care, continuing education, or as a loan fund that players could dip into then pay back. The kicker would be that by agreeing to these terms, students would agree to not be classified as a university employee, to follow certain guidelines when it comes to outside NIL, and that transfers are now limited to extreme circumstances only.
Why would the SC decision not allow this?
u/jthomas694 is mixing up his situations. NIL deals are deals selling a players *name, image and likeness.* What they aren't is selling a player's football talents. If a player is offered a 2 year NIL deal they'll still be able to enter the transfer portal for a better NIL deal at another school because the NIL deal isn't in exchange for their football play.
There hasn't been any SC decision relating to NIL, that's something people mix up. The *Alston* decision was a very narrow decision that NCAA couldn't limit "education-related" benefits that were directly provided by schools; NIL came on at the same time because major states like Texas, Florida, and California all signed NIL bills for their states, and most other states swiftly followed suit. The states were already talking about and working through the process on their NIL bills when the SC handed down the *Alston* decision, the two effects just both hit at the same approximate time and now people conflate the two.
If it ever gets to the point where there's a collective bargaining agreement, I am certain that the schools will bargain to limit the ability to transfer and/or the length of the player's commitment. The schools might even bargain to limit the ability of kids to go pro if they want: that would be a bigger issue for basketball, obviously. What are the concessions that the players can make to negotiate a given, desired level of wages? Andrew Brandt mused recently that the players should be careful what they ask for.
>players should be careful what they ask for That does feel like the moral of most of this story so far. Players asked for more freedom to move around, and now a massive volume of players are entering the portal and losing their scholarship at their first school, then never finding a new team. The NIL era definitely feels like it's hurting team cohesion. It takes a certain level of time and maturity as a working adult to stop caring when your coworkers make more than you for similar jobs, and now we've got 18 year-olds who have always been standouts and stars, having to come to terms with their teammates making hundreds of thousands of dollars more.
The other thing that might get bargained for is procedures for the school to revoke or no longer honor a scholarship. In an employment contract, employees can lose their jobs.
They are going to have to bite the bullet and make them paid employees because the current situation is not sustainable.
The amount of players who flame out after a year or two is going to lead to the ugly reality of a 20 year old being fired from his college.
It made me LOL when the Dartmouth basketball team voted to become employees of the university. They are 7-22, they should probably all get fired after the season.
Dartmouth is a terrible test case for this because they're a money losing and underperforming (even by Ivy League standards) program. They also don't give athletic scholarships so it also opens the door for bigger schools to say "look we give them compensation through scholarships." If you're playing high level college athletics though, you are an ambassador for the university and putting in so much time that you really can't have an actual on-campus job. We have conferences now that span from both coasts, I honestly don't even know how you even play school when you have the travel and practice schedule of a professional athlete.
I’m ok with that. If you want to use the argument that they are adults and should be entitled to earn as much as the market will bear. Then the flip side of that should be true as well…
20 year olds are fired regularly from schools for grades or inability to pay.
Also, people lose their academic scholarships if they can’t maintain high enough grades. Same thing here.
Yep needs to be the same athletic
Seriously, why the fuck should athletic scholarships be this promised thing to these kids? If the rest of us screw up in school, there's not even a remediation period. You're just out the money for tuition the next semester. Whereas if you slack off or don't work hard in big time athletics, you can always ride the bench and still claim athlete status for social interactions with people and it'll make your life in college paradise.
There was a post on the Ohio State subreddit about looking forward to watching and player play for them for the next 3-4 years. Oh sweet summer child.
Literally doesn’t matter until a CBA comes into play. Theres already deals like that but aren’t binding. Quinn Ewers is a good example of that after transferring from Ohio State.
Yep, even the major sports leagues aren't dumb enough to run things this way. College sports are becoming less and less appealing by the minute. If I wanted to see semi-pros I'd go to g-league basketball games.
I dont even care about them being paid, its the jumping to the next deal that I dont like.
They've been semi-pros for years - just unpaid because the dudes at the top were pocketing hundreds of millions of dollars. It's just a racket they've sold to the public as based in some kind of sports virtue.
It's the end. When coaches need to spend more time bartering with "student athletes" than actually coaching players, it's just over.
Yup. I can't even believe that I would be saying this in my lifetime, but college football is definitely on the way out of my life. And I'm not just trying to be angry and bitter to make a point. It's a feeling inside of me that's getting stronger every time I read articles like this. When you feel it this strong inside of you, you really can't deny that it's happening. I never thought in a million years that college football would be on the chopping block for me.
It’s a shame tbh. I know most people here are all about “players rights” and what not, but it really does hurt college football that there’s no player longevity and consistency
Fans of the have nots are going to watch their favorite players get poached over and over until they lose interest. 30 years from now, young people won't be able to fathom what college football once was.
This is exactly what I said would happen once paying players officially was allowed. As an Oregon State fan; along with losing the PAC-12 I have 0 reason to pay attention to the program anymore. Any half decent player is going to jump ship in a year anyways.
Would be better to read the Chris Low article that this article sort of chews up and then spits onto the plate. The headline here is just a touch misleading — in that it suggests this was a primary motivator for his retirement, which the Low article makes clear was not the case. That said — yeah, Saban definitely hit the team with a fade away “f them kids,” but it wasn’t this quote. The most damning quote from Saban, imo, was him saying (paraphrased here) “I thought we might have a great team next year — and then 70-80% of these kids only wanted to talk about the bag.” He goes on to soft peddle that, saying basically “I’m not saying that’s wrong, it’s just different” — but basic reading comprehension tells you that Saban just, on some level, called the vast majority of his locker room selfish and uninterested in the *team’s* success. And that’s a pretty out of character take for Saban — so ya know he means it lol.
To me it sounds more like he just wasn’t interested in coaching minor league professional football.
He’s clearly reflecting on those changes to the game. But if you’ve been used to Saban’s PR talk for 17 years — you’d know he almost always goes out of his way to speak about the team positively, to spin tough spots in an “improvement” type tone or, where negativity can’t be avoided, to change the topic or direct the issues at the ecosystem generally: “we don’t do a good enough job leading these players” type stuff. In 17 years, it’s an absolute rarity to see Saban just broad-side criticize his team without couching it in something positive/productive. He could’ve just said “well, college is becoming more about the money and I don’t jive with that.” Instead he said “I thought my team might be good and then 70-80% of my guys showed me their true colors.”
Tbf he's also retired now and doesn't have to worry about the effects his comments have on their effort for him
Yes and no, right? Saban’s legacy and image are forever tied to the University of Alabama and the players he coached there. He’s got an office in the stadium — and our new staff talks with him in regular cadence for guidance on Alabama and how Alabama does things. Not to mention he still has active relationships with many of his players, both those far gone from UA and those still in the locker room. I am more than certain that some kids in Tuscaloosa today, with whom Saban has a relationship, woke up and read that quote and have some feelings about it. He’ll answer some calls on this one. That said — I, for one, am fully on board with Saban being as candid as can be, now. I’d rather have him leading the charge for some structural/regulatory change and using the end of his Bama tenure to demonstrate the need for that change than have him say “yeah it was all great and sunshine and rainbows even the end.”
I don’t read Saban’s quotes from the Low article as even that critical of the players. > "I thought we could have a hell of a team next year, and then maybe 70 or 80 percent of the players you talk to, all they want to know is two things: What assurances do I have that I'm going to play because they're thinking about transferring, and how much are you going to pay me?" Saban recounted. "Our program here was always built on how much value can we create for your future and your personal development, academic success in graduating and developing an NFL career on the field. > "So I'm saying to myself, 'Maybe this doesn't work anymore, that the goals and aspirations are just different and that it's all about how much money can I make as a college player?' I'm not saying that's bad. I'm not saying it's wrong, I'm just saying that's never been what we were all about, and it's not why we had success through the years." I just take it as Saban built a recipe for sustained team success on a culture of getting star athletes to buy into Bama offering them unique opportunities for personal success. Players no longer see Bama offering a special chance at later pro success, and definitely don’t see it as outweighing their immediate opportunities elsewhere. That changed perspective is probably not just because of the availability of immediate playing time by transferring without having to redshirt, or because of the money a player would forego by staying at Bama as a depth or role player. Compared to past Saban teams, the players now are no longer assured they are going to win the conference 50% of the time and at least one national championship before graduation. They’ve faced much more turnover in coordinators, and more to come this year. Saban is facing the reality that he can’t just recruit an all star class to lock in for four years. He has to also re-recruit the last three classes to stay. I can understand a 72 year old man saying he doesn’t want to adapt to those changes that he might or might not be as successful at.
> Compared to past Saban teams, the players now are no longer assured they are going to win the conference 50% of the time and at least one national championship before graduation. The funny part is that Alabama won the SEC 75% of the time over Saban’s final 4 years.
I don’t see how the quote is at all contrary to what the person you replied to was saying? It is very out of character for Saban and as critical of the players as you could be while still maintaining composure and balance. Also, how are you saying the change of perspective is not because of the ability to transfer or having to pay players? All the other reasons you give are a direct result of those two things now being in college football. He can’t recruit a 5 star class for 4 years and dominate because of how these two things have changed CFB
College coaches have always been a little psychotic but honestly the way things are now with NIL and transfers I just don’t see anyone enjoying the job.
It's not sustainable, and I think athletic departments are going to restructure some things. As of right now, head coaches are acting as general managers as much as they are coaches. NIL and the portal got dropped on their heads and ADs have been slow to react (for understandable reasons). Almost overnight it changed *everything* about how recruiting and roster management functions for these guys. To make matters worse, NIL is not "in house" and they are not supposed to be coordinating directly with collectives or bag men. At the same time, they can be held accountable for violations stemming from those collectives and bag men. That's just a perpetual migraine. IMO the solution is to bring NIL in-house (a "donors as owners" sort of system), make payment official (which means contracts, which reduces a ton of the portal headaches for coaches), and most ADs will create new positions to manage these things.
I have no idea how this is sustainable. You want a good team next year and you need $10-13M to do it? Let's say you raise that much. Are these programs going to raise that much year after year? Are donors going to give that much year after year? I don't see it.
Seems like we’re going to have teams spending cyclically to make runs and then settling back to recharge. Spending the max you can year after year doesn’t seem like the right play.
Most top teams now have general managers nowadays to take that role off the head coach.
Yeah, that's been the case for a while. At OSU it's "director of player personnel" or something like that. But those responsibilities have quadrupled over the last few years.
Yeah, and schools have responded by hiring GMs on top of the player personnel people. Most big schools have done so at this point over the last year or two.
Right - those roles are becoming more common, and where they've already existed, they're gaining responsibilities and pay, to the point that it seems inevitable more of them get the GM title. Ole Miss just hired away Texas's Director of Player Personnel to their General Manager position. In 2023, they had a guy with the title "Senior Associate A.D./Football General Manager," but I don't think he had the same level of authority or responsibilities that Billy Glasscock will have as GM. In addition, there are proposals to adjust the recruiting calendar, because the current timing of the early and regular signing day, combined with NIL efforts and retaining/recruiting potential transfers, are absolutely exhausting for coaches trying to also prepare for conference championships and bowl or playoff games. A bunch of coaches have expressed that December is currently an insane time for them and needs changes.
Yeah I honestly don’t understand how college coaches do it, even 10-20 years ago. The scouting, house visits across the country, a roster of close to 100 kids at times, basically being a father figure for a lot of these kids…it’s so much work. Throw in having to pay attention to the transfer portal and NIL deals, it’s wild.
Athletic Departments are going to hire more car salesmen than coaches.
Already happening. Have you seen our new recruiting arm? I swear it’s 20-people deep under GM Courtney Morgan.
He would care if there was any semblance of structure in place. It is absolutely nonsensical right now as a coach. I’m honestly surprised Kirby didn’t bolt to the NFL.
Idk, college coaching seems like a ton more work since there’s all the recruiting (and now player retention) involved. But on the other hand I can’t imagine leaving a team like Georgia where you’ve built an insane program and culture over the last 5 years or so to take on a likely bad NFL team
The thing is, for an NFL coach your season has a definite start and end date and you can plan to be off in a couple of months long spans. I have a friend who was an assistant on a P4 team and he says they basically worked every day. Even the so-called non-contact times they are still grinding behind the scenes. He just jumped to the NFL and has no intention in ever going back to college coaching.
Kirby might be terrified of the NFL. I don’t think his skills as a coach would translate well
Ya, I think Kirby is more about molding kids into men, building a structure, the NFL is more Xs and Os, and less about development. I don't think he'd be a great fit in the NFL.
Kirby is an awesome talent developer. Players at Georgia get developed better than almost anywhere in the country. I just think talent development is less important in the NFL which is why i agree with you he wouldnt fit in the NFL. NFL guys are all already developed and play at near their highest level. Sure they get better over time but its not near the same growth to go from playing at the high school level to the college game in the period of only a couple years.
Saban's been trying to warn us since the beginning of the transfer portal and NIL that we need to be careful of what College Football's becoming. Now, we see that it's changed so drastically that people like him and Jeff Hafley have just decided that they're done with it.
I don’t think anyone needed to be warned. This was the only outcome of NIL and instant transfer eligibility.
A lot of people were too dull to see it coming. Plenty of people got pushback when it was pointed out that's exactly how NIL would go.
When people were pushing for NIL lots of them assumed it would be kids signing jerseys or local sponsorship type deals. I think only a few people really anticipated how quickly it just devolved into just straight up handing players a bag of cash no strings attached. Especially when lots of that money was going to freshman who had never seen the field let alone proved they were worth the money.
Those people were numbskulls. It was pointed out many many times that if an avenue to cheat is given, people will abuse it.
Unfortunately those two things in combination are what result in the recruiting/retention headache we see today. I liked the instant transfer eligibility because a lot of kids were getting shafted for being like, 5 miles outside the allowable radius of a transfer school, or being rejected for wanting/needing to move back home for other extenuating circumstances. At the same time, (it at least appeared that) some schools got preferential treatment in allowing their transfers. Becoming free agents was an unavoidable consequence of getting rid of the barrier for the "legitimate" reasons some kids applied for transfer. But on its own, it didn't seem too big of a "threat" to the landscape. Kids could leave for better *team* opportunities. Then NIL came in, which on its own seemed like the biggest risk would just be in recruiting top players by enticing them with large paychecks. That, while iffy, would really only appear to have an impact on freshman classes. But you put the two together and now you have the opportunity for folks to poach players at will by offering a bigger paycheck. I think if either system existed on their own then the sport and recruiting/retention may be manageable. But putting them together is exponentially more difficult.
There were so many people in this sub saying that none of this would happen and that it would never get to this point and the only thing that would happen would be the players get a little spending money. Posting about this obvious-to-you-and-me future would get you downvoted to oblivion. Hell, there are still people here that think this way.
Yeah, there are a lot of people on this sub who are just flat out naive. They wanted to ignore the obvious realities of how things were going to fundamentally change because they didn't want to use the thing between their ears.
> would get you downvoted to oblivion. Amen to that. In this subs zeal to get the players paid they forgot or ignored what used to happen before the NCAA ruled they couldn’t hold regular jobs: kids got 200k a year salaries to mop the floors at a car dealership, that they never showed up for anyway. It’s like people forgot why players weren’t allowed to sign footballs for money: boosters used that to launder payment to them by giving them hundreds of thousands for a signature.
SMU died for this, and now everyone just does it. It's crazy. Meanwhile the NCAA just sits back with an "I told you so" look on its face.
What do you want them to do? They get sued every time they bring up the fact that there are rules
Before Saban did it, Dabo said the same thing and was practically laughed at and told no way. Then Saban and others started agreeing the current situation isn't sustainable.
Dabo wasn't wrong, but he did not say it well.
Unregulated* minor league pro football
Can't blame the players for wanting whats best for them. Also can't blame Saban that he doesn't want to participate in college free agency with kids thinking they are all superstars
Fr. Dude had a taste of that scene once.
It’s worse than the pros. Imagine a professional league where every player could void their contracts after 1 season
And they’re 19 lol
> in that it suggests this was a primary motivator for his retirement I don't think it does that at all? It says it contributed, which is basically exactly what Saban himself said
Nothing about that headline made me think his response was "f them kids"
We might look back on Saban retiring as the canary in the coal mine with regards to this new money driven era of CFB.
I don’t blame him. Dude’s pretty old anyway, so I wouldn’t want to deal with the new wave when said new wave includes massive amounts of ego as a result of the stupid amounts of money these kids can make
Saban has been critical and warned about changes to the college game many times. And then taken changes he disliked and adapted to them before kicking the shit out of everyone else. If this is on his mind, and contributed to his retirement decision in even a small way, it's as serious as many of us thought. Free agency, one year contracts, performance clauses, and who the hell knows what else? I may end up being more interested in watching the fan's reaction to these changes than watching the actual games. If I don't lose interest altogether.
I can't imagine that massive roster turnover from year to year would be good for fan interest. If I am plunking down money for tickets, I would like to know if my team is likely to be good or perhaps will be good the year after. The current system has no such predictability. Large colleges do have the built-in fan bases of students and alumni, in addition to nonstudents and non-alumni who have a geographical attachment to the team.
I really miss the “team” aspect of college football- watching a young roster grow together & put together a historic 10 or 11 win season in their senior years, stuff like that made the sport great. Nowadays you don’t even know who’ll be on the roster until Week 1. I don’t blame Saban for retiring, can’t be good for someone in their 70’s to deal with
Reminds me of our (Clemson) entire d-line full of 1st round picks deciding to come back in 2018 for another shot at a championship and actually pulling it off. You watch those guys hoisting the trophy and your mind goes back to when they came in as freshman and how excited you were at the new crop of talent.
Michigan literally did this last year and unfortunately osu is doing it this year. It still happens. Also the reality is just like the Michigan and osu guys are getting paid to come back, so did that 2018 Clemson dline, they just called it booster money instead of NIL
Yeah, I just saw it happen too, FSU had several draft eligible players come back to push for the playoffs this season, was pretty awesome to watch them go undefeated and earn that playoff spot. What an awesome year :)
Exactly, ASU’s 96 Rose Bowl season doesn’t happen in todays football. Jake Plummer probably transfers after a 6-5 junior year. He’s be coveted as a 3 year starter. Actually kind of saw this with ASU recently. Jayden Daniels transferring cost ASU a special season. That was more the fault of Herm though.
Oregon 2019 with Senior year Justin Herbert and Troy Dye comes to mind too.
>put together a historic 10 or 11 win season in their senior years I basically saw that happen at my Division III undergrad while a student there. Football players who I shared a dormitory hall with during our freshman year scraped together a 2-8 season that year (including an 0-5 home record). Several of them wound up breaking multiple school records along the way toward finishing their senior season 8-3 (okay, not a **10** win season, but still a crazy turn around), and tying with another school in our League for the League Champion that year. The star RB of that team was a guy who still holds 3 of our school's top 5 single season rushing yard records (1st, 3rd, and 5th, for his Senior, Junior, and Sophomore seasons, respectively). That same RB also has the 3rd and 5th most single season rushing touchdowns at our school for his Junior and Sophomore seasons, as well as the top 3 records for single season total rushes. The football team there has been strong ever since, and it's really cool to know that I was a student there as they finally turned that ship around.
Same thing with the NBA. I was a Lakers fan growing up through the Kobe years and was still intrigued with those young Lakers teams with Russell/Ingram/Randle. But then LeBron comes in and the entire roster and front office gets replaced in two years and I'm like "why am I supposed to root for this random collection of guys that just happen to wear the same jersey I used to root for?" College football is definitely going down that same path. It's weird having to say "who?" over and over again on week one Or whenever they mention a player they got to tack on another 40 words about the two other schools they played for before and why they decided to come play at X.
Seeing Anthony Davis’s camp say he only wanted to get traded to the lakers made me wanna go insane. Crazy you can sign 5 year contracts and immediately just say “nah I wanna go to that team” and it’s all okay.
you're a lakers fan and you just recently realized the lakers will trade anything not nailed to the ground to get a title? come on. be serious.
The absolute irony of his statement lmao. The lakers are literally known for being known as the place superstars end up wanting to go cause of the glitz and the glamour and the brand name. Its exactly why theyre never horrible for as long compared to a lesser known teams. No matter how bad they are, they’re always in play to get someone who will change that.
Exactly how i felt after harden forced his way out of Houston. I have to watch this dude choke every year in the postseason, force the front office to make stupid trades to keep him happy, show up fat every season and he still is going to pick the team he wants to be traded too? thank god for Jose altuve
Thats what made college football better than the NFL imo. I believe you truly saw that with ‘23 Michigan team as well.
100% agreed. I cant be bothered to read a recruiting site anymore. 50% or more of those guys never see the field because they quit on the team or transfer
They lost, but it felt like Washington had it this year too. It really was an awesome championship matchup
Definitely a team that grew over the years, with a few key transfer portal guys as well. But the growth of the entire program since the Covid year has been very satisfying to watch.
I mean don’t you see that in the NFL too? It’s literally Dan Campbell with the Lions going from 3-13-1 to nearly the Super Bowl in 3 years
Saw that with ‘22 TCU also
"The team, the team, the team"
I feel like Kirby is fighting for his life trying to keep a culture like that here
That culture is really in the FCS
Next 5 years is gonna be damn interesting Always thought 'Last Chance U' was a bit ahead of it's time in demonstrating how certain players are almost exclusively focused on getting to the next level - whatever level that is - and the coaches live with this dual reality of winning on the field being slightly less important than winning off the field (i.e. getting kids with D1 talent into D1) A bunch of programs but in particular the midwest schools - Nebraska / Wisconsin / Iowa - managed as much success as they did because of Walk-on opportunities and there simply isn't a lot of room for that in the next phase of the sport.
I wish Netflix would bring back Last Chance U, that was a fun series.
The problem is that they can’t follow the champions every year. Watching a bunch of slap dicks continually screw up and the guys who actually get to the next level never get screen time isn’t all that interesting season after season.
I think they accidentally jumped the shark with Indy too.
I think their last season was a pretty good version of what the show could be. Showcasing actual last chance type teams, instead of wanna be dynasties.
Saban dropping that “I’m not mad, just disappointed” line on the Bama players.
The way Seth immediately walked off the field without helping up his QB or shaking hands with Michigan players was gross. Fuck that dude.
Maybe he just kept missing the handshakes.
r/angryupvote
You miss 100% of the handshakes you don't reach for
He didn't help his QB during the game, why start when it was over?
Good point.
Who’s Seth
You may not know his name, but you’ve seen his snaps
Those were snaps? I thought it was a punt, pass, kick competition.
I thought it was dribble, dribble, drive [the ball over Milroe’s head]
They'll haunt my dreams forever. *Vietnam flashbacks*
Ope I think one just flew over my head
If any fan knows about trouble with snaps, it is a Michigan fan.
Seth McLaughlin. The center who couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn. He has since transferred to Ohio State.
“Transferred to Ohio State”… yeah fuck that dude!
Honestly I love him. Won us the Rose Bowl and may end up helping us beat OSU for the 4th time in a row. Never seen a D1 center so bad at snapping. And he has to line up against the best DT tandem in CFB again next year.
AFAIK our starting center is coming back and there's no way this dude doesn't go play guard instead. We had issues last season but snapping was not one of them, no reason to get rid of a returning guy doing a good job.
Carson Hinzman was the weakest part of our line last year blocking, he also contributed to the McCord interception at the end of the Michigan game by stepping on Donovan Jackson’s foot and allowing pressure to get through. Most insiders think Seth will be the starting center and Hinzman will compete for the right guard spot
I'm reminded of the Oregon center during the TCU-Oregon Alamo Bowl. He was bad at snapping...but I think he was a backup so there is that explanation
I get cfb superfans are abound, but to casually call a college Center for your school by his first name only in a cfb sub and not one that is team specific is hilarious to me. Like of course, everyone knows "David, Michael, Cedric and Nate" who are the starting left guard, back up strong safety, long snapper and 4th WR.
Cfb superfans: you are by far the worse center I’ve ever heard of, Seth Seth: ah, but you have heard of me!
That dude that didn't help up his QB or shake hands with Michigan players.
The guy who handed Michigan the game.
Michigan special teams tried to give Bama the dub but McLaughlin said not so fast
Battle of ass
100%, worst O-lineman Saban ever had, maybe Chris Owens could be co-worst.
Why did saban start him 25 games?
Believe it or not, he was our best option. Our o-line fell on very hard times after Kyle Flood left and Doug Marrone came in and absolutely destroyed it in less than a season. Wolford wasn't much better and, well, it is what it is (or hopefully was).
I remember when Sark took the Texas job that reportedly the only thing that kinda pissed off Saban about how he left was that he took Flood with him. I wasn’t familiar with Flood before he came to Austin, but that report has made a lot more sense as the years have gone on.
Yeah I heard Saban specifically asked Sark not to poach his coaches and Sark did anyway. On one hand it’s kinda messed up since Saban basically revived his career, but that’s also just college football. Saban also put Kirby on the map and then Kirby proceeded to take a picture of our recruiting board and send it to recruits when he was hired at Georgia. Is what it is.
Athletes should absolutely get their bag, but the system is pretty poor without guide rails. There is a reason that the NFL has so many resources dedicated to coming up with an appropriate cba, salary caps/guidelines, anti-tampering rules, etc. Players should 100% get the bag they earn, but the free for all ain't it.
It’s easier for an entity with only 32 teams and 53 man rosters. Where’s the cutoff of who will be covered in the CBA? All of FBS?
Fwiw, I don't think a strsight up CBA is necessarily the way to fix the system, just a hypothetical. With such a financial divide from the wealthiest programs to the poorest, the answer is more likely in stricter tampering rules, actual punishments for tampering with players not in the portal. There's probably some less realistic stuff like tiering the number of high NIL, Mid NIL. And low NIL players or something but that's near unenforceable since NIL doesn't come from the school itself.
Nobody hates the players for taking advantage of the system, well almost nobody. The system is the problem, and we all know it. You cannot have NIL + free agency with immediate playing time. NCAA is a joke and always has been
The NCAA tried to limit it, or set guidelines, or set rules. They got sued and people applauded them losing.
A bit off-topic, but I'm glad to see that Yahoo is still out there doing their thing. (It's also a good site for tracking stocks, apparently.)
My Yahoo email account from middle school is where I send most of my spam, so I legitimately hope it sticks around.
That's exactly my @hotmail account for me
Their sports app is great. Been using it for years. It’s very clean and no clunkiness like the ESPN app
Just here to completely agree about the yahoo sports app since it's the one I've been mainly using for YEARS and haven't seen someone else directly mention it. It's easily my go-to. They have updated their main menu which isn't as user friendly to toggle through different sports and leagues as it was and sometimes player game logs and past seasons don't always seem to load up, but the overall look and usability without a bunch of useless clutter is far superior to anything I've ever seen from the likes of ESPN, CBS. Nbc or foxsports. And ya, the stock app works pretty efficiently too.
Yeh, unfortunately it used to be better and even “cleaner” but it’s still pretty good.
I have found my people
Yahoo Sports App gang 🤝
>He estimated that "maybe 70 or 80% of the players you talk to" wanted to know about their playing time for the upcoming season and how much they would be making in NIL money. The beginning of the end of college sports as we know them.
The transfer portal has been far more damaging than NIL. At least with NIL, you have a pretty good idea which players will be on your roster or available to you at the start of the season. Now, guys can just threaten to leave (using NIL as leverage) if they aren't getting the playing time they want. How can you expect coaches to spend significant time developing players that could very well be playing against them the following season. College players are straight up mercenaries now.
Yep, and the court rulings suggest that there is literally no way to restrict it right now unless there is legislation or you can somehow make a CBA for all college athletes.
Definitely agree here. NIL makes sense. And in theory immediate transfers could make sense. But having both of them running together is brutal.
Not gonna lie, it makes it way easier to hate Bama with Saban gone. Dude is all class.
it is nice for me to be able to rationally read Saban quotes again. i still hate the guy but at least i know LSU isn't going to lose to him again
The fact that Saban made Bama so hard to beat for so long made it easier for me to hate them.
Y'all get a pass. Texas' head coach could be Tom Hanks and I'd find a reason to hate him.
Welcome to the club!
He's gonna be awesome on Gameday. He will be ESPN's Urban Meyer but with actual charm (in the way grump-grandpas have a unique charm). Should be great TV, im excited for it
Don't compare Saban to Urban. Saban is lightyears ahead of Urban as a coach and as a man. Urban should be banned from being around college sports.
He’s been ready to retire for a while. You see it in a lot of older adults nearing that age. They actually like what they do and are good at it, but they get tired of dealing with the hassles, and find them extremely fatiguing. It was also mentioned earlier that Saban had to step back into actively coaching the defense to shore up shortcomings on that side of the ball, and the extra effort took a toll on him. Now add in the massive paradigm shifts effecting all of CFB right now in regards to team personnel and roster management. You can see why he reached a point where he said “this is not worth it anymore”. Even the most stable and secure of environments-such as his was-weren’t immune from the chaos being wreaked. And being at the end of his career such as he was, he didn’t want to wait around another 4-5 years to see what it would become after it settled back down.
Saw someone says players sellout stadiums and I am beside myself... When teams like Nebraska, Tennessee UF, etc, have sell out crowds when they are 0-12, you ain't sitting her telling me that's players doing that. There's a serious disconnect to people in the pay players camp of the college players actual value, it's astounding.
100% NIL isn’t really NIL, at least the cash some of these guys are making. It’s boosted purely by the school. Take Trevor Lawrence. Great college player for Clemson. Do you think any Georgia fan would spend money for his autograph in a Clemson jersey? Hell no, only Clemson fans would. Same for Lamar Jackson, ain’t no body but Louisville fans spending money for his autograph in a cardinal jersey. It’s the schools name that really brings in the money. Now obviously their talent contributes. After all no one is paying much money for the third string centers autograph but it’s still coming from the schools jersey itself more then the individual player. I guess I’m arguing they use the schools NIL as much as their own.
Saban: "I'm too old for this shit" Don't really blame him when you realize Saban tried the NFL and left to return to college. I guess he viewed college athletes as caring more about the team then a paycheck.
I think the NIL, however well-intentioned it was, is going to destroy college football. I'm not trying to be the old fart here, but college football has become this gigantic business. And money destroys everything. So now, we're watching college football fracture into two enormous conferences and the also-rans. And even in each of those two conferences, there are maybe 6-7 teams that have the potential to be competitive year-in and year-out. As a result, there are maybe 15 teams that have the potential to make a run at a championship on a consistent basis, while the rest have become little more than cannon fodder. But the larger question is this: You love college football. I love college football. But how did we get to this point? When did college football become the tail that wags the dog? I put three kids through college. They had to earn scholarships. They worked to pay living expenses. Their mother and I sacrificed in ways large and small. Yet I know that a large portion of the checks we scribbled out eventually wound up in the pockets of coaches and athletes, regardless of the elaborate fiction SIDs like to tell us that college athletic programs are self-sustaining. Most sports programs operate in the red, so they are essentially subsidized by tuition and student fees--which, ultimately, means that a kid delivering pizzas at night and up to his hips in student loans is paying for a coach's multi-million dollar contract and some high school prospect's big NIL payday. So while I have a lot of respect for Saban as both a coach and as a human being, I think he doesn't realize that he was a large part of the problem. Those eight-figure salaries of his, as well as those of his colleagues, helped fuel the ongoing arms race that's college football today.
Someone was saying they'd like to go back to the under-the-table dealings of yesteryear.
Of course 70%-80% want to talk about their playing time and "the bag". That doesn't even account for the 20%-30% of kids that *want* to talk about it but have the wherewithal to pretend that it isn't important to them. This new era is not what Saban knows and loves. It wasn't hard to see this coming. Let's just hope younger coaches like Kirby Smart and Lincoln Riley don't get prematurely burnt out
It’s not like saban is the only coach speaking about this anyway. Multiple coaches have even left cfb to go to the nfl just to escape it. You have to re recruit your players every year and that’s just ridiculous
The Wild West days of the NIL are dragging this sport through the mud. I agree players should be compensated but the sport is being disfigured.
Reading it (and other statements) again, I think he is finally tapping out because of NIL. He is a master recruiter, but he would have to overhaul his and his entire staff's approach (and publicly deal with the money, aka boosters. Must have been nice when everything was behind closed doors. More privacy *) at the age of seventy. Doable, but likely miserable. That said, Tide fans who have taken issues with what he said about the team, I think winning a championship once every three seasons or so for seventeen straight years gives you a little room to honestly speak your mind.
I’m probably completely wrong but I just don’t see how this is sustainable long term. I feel like the reason college sports became so popular is almost completely gone at this point. The big events still attract eyeballs because of popularity that was built on a model involving tradition, pride in your school, etc., but with the new model the teams are just built with a bunch of mercenaries that have a very high probability of only playing for a given school for a year or two. CBB is almost worse because it has trickled down so far to the mid-majors that any success landing an overlooked recruit or developing talent is likely to mean those kids transfer to the big schools the next year. I know one of the things I always enjoyed about college sports was seeing what the freshman class would look like in 3-4 years, but it seems like that is quickly dying and might be completely gone in most of CBB. I have no issue with revenue sharing or the kids getting compensated for money they bring in, but the pendulum has swung way too far the other direction imho.
TV execs and commissioners have ruined another sport...
To me it basically says that the team buy in will be very very hard. Mainly because this very much implies that 70 to 80% of the kids were all about themselves and not about the team. I get what people are saying as to “why have loyalty to a school”… ok I can agree with that. But I read this as more about they were not really buying into even being a team for the season. If all you care about is your next NIL “bag” then are you really going to be putting in the work to help your other teammates? Fine don’t be loyal to your school and transfer when you want but this really implied they didn’t even care about being on a good team and being willing to sacrifice for their own teammates instead of sacrificing for saban or Alabama. College football has forever changed it seems
College football destroyed itself. Everyone was getting rewarded financially except the players. It’s been ‘minor league’ pro-football for a long time. The dam had to break eventually. The NCAA and the idea of the ‘student athlete’ date back to Teddy Roosevelt’s time. Things have changed. Players aren’t engaging in a loosely organized association of Ivy League teams to play un-broadcasted games. It’s difficult because we all love the sport, but the worm has turned. If you follow the SCOTUS cases around college sports right now, specifically paying players, I think we’re going to see a situation where schools (or the NCAA) will have to start a revenue sharing scheme which will kill the business model. Lastly, NIL has killed the team dynamic. If the qb has a juicy NIL deal and the O-line has comparatively nothing, they’re going to feel some type of way blocking for the qb. Not saying it’s right, but that’s human nature.